Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  Jim shook his head and screamed.

  WAKE UP!

  “Be not afraid,” the raven said, and Jim heard its wings snap at the air. “You don’t want your life, anyway. Your audience—your world—is full of scavengers, tearing you to pieces. They don’t understand you. Nobody understands you.”

  Jim remembered the grabbing arms and camera flashes. His heart slammed like an earthquake and he saw, in his mind’s eye, his audience: a million frenzied birds, ready to claw.

  “No,” he said. His voice seemed far away.

  Even the band … different creatures.

  I’m alone, he thought, and closed his eyes.

  “From the thunder and the storm,” the raven said. “And the cloud that took the form/(when the rest of Heaven was blue)/of a demon in my view.”

  Its wings made thunder, and all Jim saw was darkness.

  Follow me down.

  Dawn sun. A blind red eye, unblinking in the east. The smell of oil and sand and the sound of weeping … of hurting. Jim stood among the chaos, naked, violated. Blood dried in the dead Indian’s hair. His brown hands touched nothing. A breeze rippled his clothes. Jim felt the soul-lizard inside him, twisting like a child. He embraced it and kept it warm. NOW YOu’re MINE AND I AM YOURS. He felt the stroke of its tongue, the flick of its tail. The chaos made crazy shadows. Jim looked at his. It slithered and pulsed and Jim thought, SEE ME CHANGE.

  Time is running slight.

  I understand you, James.

  We’re quite the same, you see.

  Follow me down.

  CHANGE.

  CHANGELING.

  It opened its eyes.

  I am the Lizard King.

  The lizard’s blood ran cold and slick and angry. Its scales flushed with fresh color, and it squatted close to the trembling floor. The raven swept low and dragged its talons across the lizard’s rigid back. The lizard hissed and flicked its tongue. It struck with one claw, but the raven was out of reach. It flapped its wings and ascended to the top of the book tower.

  “I’ll destroy your soul,” said the bird. “I’ll leave your body empty and gasping, and then I’ll simply glide inside.”

  “And if my body dies?” the lizard said.

  “It is young and strong,” the raven replied. “And not ready for death.”

  “You should know I’m not afraid.”

  “The foolhardiness of youth.” The raven shook its feathers. “You think you know darkness; you write songs about ‘The End' … but you know nothing. When you have lost the one thing you truly loved … when the eye of madness glares long and hard upon you … when shadows touch your every waking moment and fill your mind with screams … only then will you know darkness. But you, lizard, are yet a shimmer; and I shall fill that beautiful body, and take it to incredible places.”

  With a passionate cry the raven took wing, rising from its perch and soaring toward the lizard. It extended its claws, screeching, wanting to strip its thorny skin. But the lizard flexed its spines and lashed forward with snapping jaws. They collided with harsh cries and an explosion of black feathers. The lizard felt its tough skin tear, its cold blood drip. It raked its claws across the raven’s wing, shedding yet more feathers, and then the bird was rising again, to the lip of a crate, where it squawked and dragged its wounded wing.

  The lizard showed its forked tongue. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  The raven rapped and tapped in anger. “As will you, lizard.”

  And so began the clash of souls. No way to tell how long it lasted; no sense of night or day about the room—only the thud of Jim’s heartbeat, running alternately fast and slow, connected to his soul as it fought, and then rested.

  They attacked in spells, coming together in a mad and angry tangle. The lizard would clamp its jaws on the raven’s wing, and the raven would gouge and peck, finding the soft flesh between its scales. They formed a new shape, a new monster: a lizard with wings; a raven with scales. This twisted creature would roll and scramble across the dusty floor, swishing its tail and spraying feathers, until—too exhausted to fight—it would separate to its component parts, blood-streaked and hurting, needing time to catch breath.

  “You can’t beat me, raven,” the lizard said. Its yellow eyes flashed.

  “Give me time.” The raven’s feathers dripped red. Its beak was notched and dull, like an old spearhead.

  “You’ve had your time.”

  Another clash, squawking and crying. The raven covered the lizard’s eyes with one wing and pecked at its unprotected stomach. The lizard twisted and whipped its tail, spines smashing against the bird’s body. They rolled across the floor, scattering fragments of Poe’s mind. The tower of books crumpled with a monstrous groan, old pages tearing loose and splashing across the floor. Crates toppled, spilling their arcane contents. Portraits were punched from the walls, and sagged in their cracked frames.

  Puddles of blood. Two bruised, torn souls. The raven flapped with wounded wings to the lid of a split coffin. The lizard slithered into the shadow of an overturned crate and licked its broken scales.

  “Almost over,” the raven said. “Time is running slight.”

  The lizard trembled. How long had it been here, trapped in this fog-covered nightmare—this unforgiving trip? Days? Months? Its life before seemed like a long-ago thing. It recalled the baked earth of authority, and the cool nights of love. It recalled crawling into the public eye and seeing its blindness. Verses and choruses tumbled across its memory, as thin as matchsticks. Pamela’s hair, smelling like smoke and honey, and the touch of her lips. Sleeping on rooftops and in the backs of cars. Mescaline and acid and the cold, constant drip of liquor. What was real? Could it be that the life it thought it had been living—the rock star, the poet, the Lizard King—had been an elaborate dream all along?

  Had this dream stopped?

  Jim’s heartbeat drummed through the floorboards, but it was slower now. Weaker. That’s my body, the lizard thought. Slowly dying. And with this realization came the knowledge that the heartbeat was the doorway. It was the only real thing. The only way out.

  My heart. The lizard shifted its bleeding body. My life.

  Beating slowly … slowly.

  The raven attacked again (motivated, also, by the rock star’s dying body). It swooped with heavy black weight and sent the lizard spinning into one corner. It followed with its talons and beak, tearing the lizard’s hard skin.

  “His body is mine,” the raven cried, blood dripping from its claws.

  The lizard blinked its yellow eyes, puffed out its spines, and fought. Another long and wearing clash, entangled for hours, biting and scratching, lurching through the scattered ruins of Poe’s mind. There came a final, fatigued flash of anger, and then the souls separated. The raven limped to its refuge and hid beneath one fractured wing, while the lizard pulled itself to the center of the room.

  My heart, it thought.

  The sound, now, was all too slow.

  My life.

  It was beneath the floorboards. Beneath this place of dark invention.

  The only way out.

  While the raven cowered and bled, the lizard gathered its remaining strength and, with claws flashing and tail slapping, assailed the trembling floor. It sought—as had been the case all night—the merest seam of unreality, and eventually found one: a crack in the floorboards, which with one hard lash of the tail became a split, and then a rift. The heartbeat grew louder, and cool blue light fanned from the wide seam. The lizard worked furiously, smashing and clawing great chunks of the floor away. The closer it got to—

  life

  —escape, the brighter the light became, the louder the heartbeat.

  The raven fluttered from its perch and limped toward the lizard, dragging both wings. It screeched and showed its talons, defiant, but powerless. Its eyes were dull black stones and its feathers were crumpled. The lizard spared it a single glance, and then struck with its tail, connecting hard with
the bird and flinging it across the room. It thudded against the wall, a broken thing. Blood-mottled feathers settled around it, as thick as oil.

  The lizard roared—more lion than reptile—and clawed away a jagged section of floor. The light that erupted was geyser-like, rushing to the high ceiling, filling the room like music. The lizard had to turn away, momentarily blinded, and when it was able to look again it could see the source of that brilliant light.

  His heartbeat. His life.

  A door.

  It shook in its frame as the life it knew—rock star, poet, and lover—pounded on the other side. And as the lizard crawled into the light and through the doorway, it heard two things clearly. The first was the raven:

  “This is just the beginning,” it squawked from its shattered place. “I will get you soon … soon … SOOOOOOOOOOOON.”

  The second sound was softer, kinder. The lizard clung to it as it fell through the doorway and into the light. Pamela’s voice, like rain on piano strings.

  “Don’t leave me, Jim," she said, and the lizard closed its eyes—could feel her hair, and the sweet touch of her breath. “Don’t leave me.”

  He opened his eyes and looked, immediately, for the raven, but all he could see, blessedly, was Pamela’s face. Her crystal eyes and freckled skin. She kissed him. One of her tears fell on his upper lip. He smiled and licked it away—thought for one moment that his tongue was forked.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Pretty neat, pretty good.”

  Beyond Pamela, the Baltimore night was glittering black, skimmed with cloud. No fog. No raven. Jim sat up and Pamela kissed him again.

  “We thought we’d lost you,” she said. “We came out here looking for you, but you were nowhere to be found. We looked everywhere, and when we came out again … there you were.”

  “I guess I was in the shadows,” Jim said. He got to his feet, brushing grit from his leather pants. The rest of the Doors were there, clustered around the backstage entrance. They looked concerned … frightened, even.

  “One of these days, man,” Ray said. “You’re not going to wake up.”

  “I’ll always wake up,” Jim said. “I just don’t know where.”

  He stepped away from them, leaning slightly to one side, his heels tapping on the ground. He could feel the lizard inside him, healing.

  “Where are you going, man?”

  Jim didn’t answer. He kept walking.

  Rue Beautreillis, Paris, France.

  Saturday July 3, 1971.

  The city slept, lights flickering like candles, with just a hint of violet dawn burning the horizon.

  The raven alighted upon the balcony of the fourth-floor apartment, shook its slick black feathers, and waited.

  The End, Beautiful Friend

  Pokky Man

  A Film by Vernor Hertzwig

  By Marc Laidlaw

  VERNOR HERTZWIG

  FILMMAKER

  In 2004 I was contacted by Digito of America to review some film footage they had acquired in litigation with the estate of a young Pokkypet Master named Hemlock Pyne. While I have occasionally played board games such as Parchesi, and various pen-and-paper role-playing games involving dwarves and wizards, in vain hopes of escaping the nightmare ordeals that infest my soul, I was hardly the target audience for the global phenomenon of Pokkypets. I knew only the bare lineaments of the young man’s story—namely that he had been at one time considered the greatest captor of Pokkypets the world had ever known. Few of these rare yet paradoxically ubiquitous creatures had escaped being added to his collection. But he had turned against his fellow Trainers, who now hurled at him the sort of venom and resentment usually reserved for race traitors. The childish, even cartoonish aspects of the story were far from appealing to me, especially as spending time on a hundred or so hours of Pokkypet footage would mean delaying my then-unfunded cinematic paean to those dedicated paleoanthropologists who study human coprolites or fossil feces. But there was an element of treachery and tragedy that lured me to look more carefully at the life and last days of Hemlock Pyne, as well as the amount of money Digito was offering. I found the combination irresistible.

  HEMLOCK PYNE

  POKKY MASTER

  To be a Pokky Captor was for me the highest calling—the highest calling! I never dreamed of wanting anything else. All through my childhood, I trained for it. It was a kind of warrior celebration … a pokkybration, you might say, of the warrior spirit. I lived, ate, breathed, drank, even pooped the Pokky spirit. Yes, pooped. Because there is dignity in everything they do. When it comes to Pokkypets, there is no room for shame—not even in pooping. In a sense, I was no different from many, many other children who dream of being Pokky Captors. The only difference between me and you, children like you who might be watching this, is that I didn’t give up on my dream. Maybe it’s because I was such a loser in every other part of my life—yeah, imagine that, I know it’s difficult, right?—but I managed to pull myself free of all those other bonds and throw myself completely into the world of Pokkypets. And I don’t care who you are or where you are, but that is still possible today.

  VERNOR HERTZWIG

  Hemlock Pyne’s natural enthusiasm connected him ineluctably with the childish world of Pokkypets—the world he never really escaped. The more I studied his footage, the more I saw a boy trapped inside a gawky man-child’s body. It was no wonder to me that he had such difficulty relating to the demands of the adult world. In cleaving to his prejuvenile addictions, it was clear that Pyne hoped to escape his own decay, and for this reason threw himself completely into a world that seems on its face eternal and unchanging. The irony is that in pursuing a childish wonderland, he penetrated the barrier that protects our fragile grasp on sanity by keeping us from seeing too much of the void that underlines the lurid cartoons of corporate consumer culture, as they caper in a crazed dumbshow above the abyss.

  PITER YALP

  ACTOR

  I think we knew, and assumed Hemlock knew, where was this was probably heading. And it’s hard to see a person you care for, a friend of many years, make the sorts of decisions he made that put him ever deeper into danger. It didn’t really help to know that it was all he cared for, that all this danger was justified in a way by passion, by love. And when you saw him light up from talking about it, it was hard to argue. He’d never had anything like that in his life. I mean, he’d been through a lot. Coming back to Pokkypets, sure it seemed childish at first, but he was so disconnected from everything anyway, we had to root for him, you know? But we still feared for him. He never did anything halfway, you know? Whenever he started anything, you always knew he was going to push it past any extreme you could imagine. So it was only sort of … sort of a shock, but more of a dreaded confirmation, when we heard the news. I remember I was in the kitchen nuking some popcorn for dinner, and the kids were watching Pokkypets on, you know, the Pokkypets network … and then our youngest said, “Look, it’s Uncle Hemlock!” Which seemed weird at first because why would he be on their cartoon? But then I saw it was the Pokkypets Evening News, and even though the sound was turned up full, I found I couldn’t hear what the anchorman was saying. I just stared at the picture of Hemlock they’d put up there … the most famous shot of him, crouched in the Pokkymaze, letting an injured Chickapork out of a Poachyball … and from the way the camera slowly zoomed back from the photo, I knew right then … he wouldn’t be coming back to us this time.

  AUGUSTINE “GUST” MASTERS

  SEAPLANE PILOT

  I was friends with Hem for years and years, used to fly him out here to the Pokkymaze in midsummer, come and collect him before fall settled in; I’d check in from time to time to see how he was doing, and drop off the occasional supply. He was a special sort of guy, and there won’t never be another like him. For one thing, he was fearless, as you can imagine you’d have to be to try living right here like he did. From where we’re standing, you can watch the migratory routes of about 150 different types of Pokk
ypets; everything from the super common Pecksniffs, to the Gold-n-Silver Specials, to the uniques like Abyssoid, who comes up out of this here lake once a year for about thirty seconds at 8:37 a.m. on September 9, and only if the 9th happens to fall on a Tuesday. Really it’s a Captor’s dream, or would be if it wasn’t a preserve. Hem came out here every year, and never once tried to capture or collect a single one of the Pokkys … in fact they were more likely to collect him. He got adopted by Chickapork to the extent you couldn’t tell who belonged to who. Anyway … he made it a point of pride that he never carried a Poachyball, that he was here to protect the Pokkypets, to prevent them from being collected. When he was young he was a heck of a Captor, but once he put that aside, that was it. He didn’t try charming them with flutes or putting them to sleep; he didn’t freeze or paralyze them with any of Professor Sequoia’s Dust Infusion, or Thunderwhack a single one. He came out empty-handed, and tried to make a Pokky out of himself, I guess. If I had to pick one thing, I guess I’d say that right there was his undoing. That and Surlymon.

  VERNOR HERTZWIG

  What others saw as evidence of everything from low self-image to schizophrenia, was to Hemlock Pyne nothing more than a kind of dramatic stage lighting, necessary to cast an imposing shadow over a world that considered him but a small-time actor in a community theater production. It did not matter to the rest of the world that in this tawdry play, Hemlock Pyne had the leading role; but to Pyne himself, nothing else mattered. He had cast himself in the part of the renegade Captor who would give himself completely to his beloved Pets. That it was to be a tragic role, I suspect would not have stopped him. And while he seems to have had premonitions of his fate, he could have asked any number of those who spent their lives working in and around the Pokky Range, and have heard many predictions that would end up remarkably close to the eventual outcome.